Food security: The challenge of growing population

Mahabub Hossain concluding his two-part write-up on \'Sustaining Food Security: Achievements and Challenges\' | Published: June 29, 2014 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2024 06:01:00

Can Bangladesh sustain the gains achieved in food security and make further progress towards sustainable food security?
The main challenge in the way of progress towards food security emanates from continuing growth of population. The progress in reducing population growth, from 3.0 per cent per year at independence to about 1.2 per cent now, is laudable. But there are indications that the progress made in fertility reduction has slowed down in recent years. In Chittagong and Sylhet divisions, the total fertility rate is still higher than three, while the national average is 2.3, and it is less than two in Khulna Division. Strong traditional norms, and socio-cultural conditions in the Chittagong and Sylhet Divisions contribute to low acceptance of family planning that will not be easy to overcome.
The population is still increasing by 1.8 million every year. Rice production has to increase by 0.4 million tons every year to meet the need for staple food for the growing population. The increase in domestic production at that rate would be difficult due to several supply-side factors. The arable land has been shrinking by 0.6 per cent every year due to demand from housing and industries, and infrastructure, as well as loss of land from river erosion. With global warming and climate change, another one-sixth of the land may be submerged with brackish water over the next 40 years due to rising sea levels with adverse impact on soil salinity.
The on-going climate has made the monsoon more erratic, raising risks in sustaining the growth in crop production. The soil fertility has been declining due to overexploitation of soil nutrients, and imbalanced use of fertilisers. The groundwater aquifer has gone down due to over-mining of groundwater through irrigating dry season irrigated rice (boro rice) that has been the predominant source of growth of rice production over the last two decades. The low hanging fruits with regards to irrigation expansion and technological progress have already been harvested. Due to all these factors, the potential for further increase in production during the dry season irrigated rice farming is getting limited.
OPPORTUNITIES AND THE GOVERNMENT'S ROLE
Â There are some silver linings, however. With economic progress people now have capacity to access a diversified diet with intake of less rice and more quality food. The per capita consumption of rice has been declining by almost 1.5 kg per person per year. Japan and South Korea had the same experience during their process of economic development.
So, despite the growth of population, the demand for rice may remain stagnant or even decline if Bangladesh can sustain rapid growth in per capita income. There is potential for further increase in rice production through intensification of land use in the vast coastal region and the depressed basins as haor and char land where single crop system (it covers about 25 per cent of the land) still prevails. The intensification is possible through use of shorter maturity crop varieties that have already been developed by our research and development (R&D) system.
The risk in rain-fed rice cultivation could be reduced by the diffusion of submergence tolerance, drought tolerance, and saline tolerance varieties in adverse agro-ecological environments, such as the southern coast and the haor areas in the northeast, and the floodprone areas in the river and coastal islands (chars). With the reduction of risk, farmers could increase utilisation growth augmenting inputs which they now use in suboptimal doses. The government can play a vital role in this area by strengthening the R&D institutions, capacity enhancement of researchers through fellowships for graduate and postgraduate level training in international research centres and advanced educational institutions, and promoting farmerparticipatory validation of improved technologies.
The hybrid rice, which produces 20 per cent higher yield than the presently grown inbred varieties, has been introduced in Bangladesh, but the diffusion has proceeded slowly because of poor grain quality. If breeders succeed in developing good quality hybrid rice, we can produce an additional 5.0 million tons of rice from the five million hectares of boro land. Bangladeshi farmers are smart in adopting finer crop management practices. But the gap in yield between farmers' field and research stations is still moderate to large. The yield gaps of existing varieties could be reduced with the adoption of finer crop management practices, such as the System of Rice Intensification (SRI), wet and dry irrigation system.
More difficult challenge is accelerating the growth in the production of non-rice foods, such as pulses, oils, fish and animal products. The demand for these nutritious food items has been growing fast with economic prosperity. There is a need to reduce the growing import dependence for non-rice foods to insulate the domestic market from the price volatility of the world market. The R&D system must find ways to fit in lower-yielding crops such as pulses and oilseeds in the rice-based system and to develop higher yielding varieties.
Although Bangladesh has made good progress in pond aquaculture by converting low-lying rice lands into fish ponds, the vast flood plains that remain under water for four to six months during the year remain under-exploited. Since these are common property resources, no investment is made for fish culture and hence the fish yield is very low, a fraction of that achieved in the same ecosystem in Vietnam and Cambodia.
We need to organise the local community -land owners, the landless and the fisher folkÂ -for culture fishery, and ensure a fair distribution of produce among them for a harmonised community-based fish culture. The non-governmental organisations (NGOs) may be encouraged to expand their operation in the seasonal flood plains. This is an area of huge increase in fish production in future. The government should provide an enabling environment to link farmers to markets with expansion of processing and storage facilities and removing constraints in the value chain.
Recently women's involvement in agriculture has been growing. Women's labour is an additional resource that can contribute to a substantial increase in the production of quality food. Women are already heavily engaged in homestead-based vegetable and fruit gardening, and subsistence-based poultry and livestock farming. The potential is large in this area.
The government and NGOs should support women farmers in playing a greater role in sustaining food security by providing easy access to knowledge of improved technology and disease management, supply of quality seeds, and access to finance at easy terms. Through production and consumption of home-produced nutritious food, and better care of the children, particularly on appropriate feeding practices such as early initiation of breast feeding, compulsory breast feeding for the first six months after birth, and complementary feeding with nutritious food, women can be instrumental in linking agriculture to nutrition and reducing undernutrition and malnutrition. Â
This is an adapted version of a
presentation, made by Dr. Mahabub Hossain at the first conference of Bangladesh Economists' Forum,
held in Dhaka on June 21-22, 2014.